Automatic are Izzy Glaudini (synths, vocals), Lola Dompé (drums, vocals), and Halle Saxon (bass, vocals). The band first met while immersed in L.A.’s DIY music scene and started jamming together in 2017. Once they started playing out, word quickly spread about their explosive live shows, and they became a mainstay in the L.A. club circuit. After their debut album, Signal, was released on Stones Throw Records in 2019, they began touring internationally and opening for acts such as Bauhaus. In 2022, they shared the stage with Tame Impala, Parquet Courts, and IDLES.
Automatic’s second album, Excess, rides the imaginary edge where the ‘70s underground met the corporate culture of the ‘80s – or, as the band puts it, “That fleeting moment when what was once cool quickly turned and became mainstream, all for the sake of consumerism.” Using this point in time as a lens through which to view the present moment, Excess takes aim at corporate culture and extravagance. Surrealist automatism is a method of art-making in which the artist suppresses conscious control over the making process, allowing the unconscious mind to have great sway.
The overarching themes of alienation and escapism emerged as Automatic put Excess together, taking writing retreats to flesh out the new songs before decamping to the studio for sprint recording sessions with producer Joo Joo Ashworth (Sasami, FROTH).
On “New Beginning,” they reject the false hope of leaving behind a scorched planet and searching for “a better place,” at a moment when the ultra-rich are eyeing manned space travel: “In the service of desire / We will travel far away.” The song and accompanying video imagine the “nihilism and loneliness” of attempting to escape the planet once unchecked consumerism has reached its logical outcome.
Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud used free association and automatic drawing or writing to explore the unconscious mind of his patients.
Freud’s ideas strongly influenced French poet André Breton, who launched the surrealist movement in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism. In the manifesto, Breton defined surrealism as Pure psychic automatism, automatic’s overarching themes o falienantion and escapeism emerged as automatic put Excess together; the dictation of thought without all control exercised by reason and outside all moral or aesthetic concerns.
Jackson Pollock’s and others’ abstract expressionism was an essential element in the European movements of art informel and arte nucleare.
While the term automatism is associated explicitly with twentieth-century artists, particularly surrealism, earlier artists such as Alexander Cozens used some elements of chance to create works. In contrast, others reportedly tapped into visionary or trance states.
